Our journey to-day was no less delightful than before, still all new, boundless, limitless.  Kinmont says, that limits are sacred; that the Greeks were in the right to worship a god of limits.  I say, that what is limitless is alone divine, that there was neither wall nor road in Eden, that those who walked, there lost and found their way just as we did, and that all the gain from the Fall was that we had a wagon to ride in.  I do not think, either, that even the horses doubted whether this last was any advantage.

Everywhere the rattlesnake-weed grows in profusion.  The antidote survives the bane.  Soon the coarser plantain, the “white man’s footstep,” shall take its place.

We saw also the compass-plant, and the Western tea-plant.  Of some of the brightest flowers an Indian girl afterwards told me the medicinal virtues.  I doubt not those students of the soil knew a use to every fair emblem, on which we could only look to admire its hues and shape.

After noon we were ferried by a girl (unfortunately not of the most picturesque appearance) across the Kishwaukie, the most graceful of streams, and on whose bosom rested many full-blown water-lilies,—­twice as large as any of ours.  I was told that, en revanche, they were scentless, but I still regret that I could not get at one of them to try.  Query, did the lilied fragrance which, in the miraculous times, accompanied visions of saints and angels, proceed from water or garden lilies?

Kishwaukie is, according to tradition, the scene of a famous battle, and its many grassy mounds contain the bones of the valiant.  On these waved thickly the mysterious purple flower, of which I have spoken before.  I think it springs from the blood of the Indians, as the hyacinth did from that of Apollo’s darling.

The ladies of our host’s family at Oregon, when they first went, there, after all the pains and plagues of building and settling, found their first pastime in opening one of these mounds, in which they found, I think, three of the departed, seated, in the Indian fashion.

One of these same ladies, as she was making bread one winter morning, saw from the window a deer directly before the house.  She ran out, with her hands covered with dough, calling the others, and they caught him bodily before he had time to escape.

Here (at Kiskwaukie) we received a visit from a ragged and barefooted, but bright-eyed gentleman, who seemed to be the intellectual loafer, the walking Will’s coffee-house, of the place.  He told us many charming snake-stories; among others, of himself having seen seventeen young ones re-enter the mother snake, on the approach of a visitor.

This night we reached Belvidere, a flourishing town in Boon County, where was the tomb, now despoiled, of Big Thunder.  In this later day we felt happy to find a really good hotel.

From this place, by two days of very leisurely and devious journeying, we reached Chicago, and thus ended a journey, which one at least of the party might have wished unending.